Chatterjee argues that colonialism has rendered India a "consumer" rather than a producer of modernism. At the heart of his argument is the notion that "universal modernity" is a false construct or "chimera." Modernity is not the same in every culture; part of the challenge facing India and other colonized lands is the need to define the "modern" within the context of their own culture.

Chatterjee begins by discussing Rajnarayan Basu's 1873 book Those Days and These Days. Basu reflects on the changes in India that have come with the British educational system and argues that the "modernity" that comes with English education is inferior to the "old ways" of Indian life. Chatterjee uses Rajanarayan's argument to support his own definition of modernity, which is to apply "the methods of reason to identify or invent specific technologies of modernity that are appropriate for our purposes."

Chatterjee locates this idea of universal modernity in the work Kant's concept of "enlightenment" and invokes Foucault as a way of demonstrating how the ideology of "professionalism" and the rise of the expert has replaced traditional knowledge and usurped the agency of the colonized. Whereas Kant saw modernity as an "escape from the past" and a path to self-reliance and freedom, for the colonized, Kant's modernity means subjection and the destruction of the self; for Indians, modernity is an escape from the present into the past.